Never-Fail Blake | Page 4

man I want. And Schmittenberg tells me you know where
he is." Blake, as he spoke, continued to look heavily down at his desk
top.
"Yes?" she answered cautiously, watching herself as carefully as an
actress with a rôle to sustain, a rôle in which she could never quite
letter-perfect.
"It's Connie Binhart," cut out the Second Deputy.

He could see discretion drop like a curtain across her watching face.
"Connie Binhart!" she temporized. Blake, as his heavy side glance
slewed about to her, prided himself on the fact that he could see
through her pretenses. At any other time he would have thrown open
the flood-gates of that ever-inundating anger of his and swept away all
such obliquities.
"I guess," he went on with slow patience "we know him best round here
as Charles Blanchard."
"Blanchard?" she echoed.
"Yes, Blanchard, the Blanchard we 've been looking for, for seven
months now, the Blanchard who chloroformed Ezra Newcomb and
carried off a hundred and eighteen thousand dollars."
"Newcomb?" again meditated the woman.
"The Blanchard who shot down the bank detective in Newcomb's room
when the rest of the bank was listening to a German band playing in the
side street, a band hired for the occasion."
"When was that?" demanded the woman.
"That was last October," he answered with a sing-song weariness
suggestive of impatience at such supererogative explanations.
"I was at Monte Carlo all last autumn," was the woman's quick retort.
Blake moved his heavy body, as though to shoulder away any claim as
to her complicity.
"I know that," he acknowledged. "And you went north to Paris on the
twenty-ninth of November. And on the third of December you went to
Cherbourg; and on the ninth you landed in New York. I know all that.
That's not what I 'm after. I want to know where Connie Binhart is, now,
to-day."

Their glances at last came together. No move was made; no word was
spoken. But a contest took place.
"Why ask me?" repeated the woman for the second time. It was only
too plain that she was fencing.
"Because you know," was Blake's curt retort. He let the gray-irised eyes
drink in the full cup of his determination. Some slowly accumulating
consciousness of his power seemed to intimidate her. He could detect a
change in her hearing, in her speech itself.
"Jim, I can't tell you," she slowly asserted. "I can't do it!"
"But I 've got 'o know," he stubbornly maintained. "And I 'm going to."
She sat studying him for a minute or two. Her face had lost its earlier
arrogance. It seemed troubled; almost touched with fear. She was not
altogether ignorant, he reminded himself, of the resources which he
could command.
"I can't tell you," she repeated. "I'd rather you let me go."
The Second Deputy's smile, scoffing and melancholy, showed how
utterly he ignored her answer. He looked at his watch. Then he looked
back at the woman. A nervous tug-of-war was taking place between her
right and left hand, with a twisted-up pair of ecru gloves for the cable.
"You know me," he began again in his deliberate and abdominal bass.
"And I know you. I 've got 'o get this man Binhart. I 've got 'o! He 's
been out for seven months, now, and they 're going to put it up to me,
to me, personally. Copeland tried to get him without me. He fell down
on it. They all fell down on it. And now they're going to throw the case
back on me. They think it 'll be my Waterloo."
He laughed. His laugh was as mirthless as the cackle of a guinea hen.
"But I 'm going to die hard, believe me! And if I go down, if they think
they can throw me on that, I 'm going to take a few of my friends along
with me."

"Is that a threat?" was the woman's quick inquiry. Her eyes narrowed
again, for she had long since learned, and learned it to her sorrow, that
every breath he drew was a breath of self-interest.
"No; it's just a plain statement." He slewed about in his swivel chair,
throwing one thick leg over the other as he did so. "I hate to holler
Auburn at a girl like you, Elsie; but I 'm going--"
"Auburn?" she repeated very quietly. Then she raised her eyes to his.
"Can you say a thing like that to me, Jim?"
He shifted a little in his chair. But he met her gaze without a wince.
"This is business, Elsie, and you can't mix business and--and other
things," he tailed off at last, dropping his eyes.
"I 'm sorry you put it that way," she said. "I hoped we 'd be better
friends than that!"